Sports I lustraded

Everything to do with with hating EA sports and boycotting their products. Check out this team blog The EA Haters.

If you really are into this EA boycott you can blog about it here. They let you join and add your own daily thoughts. This is a pretty good idea. I like the whole team blog thing anyway and this is a great place for people to vent and for a smart company to listen.

But I doubt any EA or NFL people will take stock in anything until they see sales drop. Sports fans are just too loyal to their favorite team to not have them in their gaming.

What if your kid doesn't like sports?

Psyched - Dealing with Abusive Coaches: says:

" So who is to blame for this? Just like with my nephew, the suspect is all too often the coach. One study found that the top two reasons children cited for quitting organized sports were that it was no longer fun or interesting. The individual who should be held accountable for this is the coach."

This is just nuts. This article is all about what to do if you have an abusive coach, which the author admits is quite often in modern youth sports, and that's always good info to have because unfortunately it is too often true; but to say that all kids who find sports uninteresting have the coach to blame is unfair to coaching and the children.

HELLO! Attention sports fans everywhere! Some of us don't like sports. Some of us find the whole mindless comptetion thing and the constant presure to pummel your enemy into the ground to be somewhat barbaric. Many people find the idea of freezing your A off while running around with a ball or worse, watching those who are, to be quite boring and unentertaining at times. Just because your kid doesn't like sports does not mean they are freaks or the coach yells at them too much.

I did the soccer dad thing and was married to a coach and referee for 5 years, my step daughter loved it, my step son did not. He felt pressured to compete by his dad who is a sports guy and his mom who was actually coaching and refereeing at the time, so he kept doing it but we often had trouble getting him to games or encouraging him to participate once he got there. He just didn't enjoy it and always became frustrated that he was just never going to be the superstar everyone expected no matter how hard he tried. We always let him make the decision to play or not, but he never wanted to hurt anyone's feelings and played anyway just to keep from having to sit on the sidelines.

See, I do know something about sports first hand. I slept with a soccer coach and referee for five years! She finally quit because she was tired of being abused by the over zealous parents who wanted to "go, fight, win" and could care less about sportsmanship or letting everyone play even though that is the one rule in AYSO soccer. There are really way too many jock head parents in youth sports, trust me I used to take the calls at 6am asking "is my kid starting today?"

At least the good doctor who wrote this article concludes "The easiest way to deal with an abusive coach is to not allow him or her from coming into contact with our children. Simply put, stop the problem before it occurs. To do this, you need to do some self-examination and research. "

Which is more than I can say for many people who just care about winning and let coaches abuse their children in the name of "fun".

A few people have suggested I start over on the title of this blog. Friends fear I'll get sued and some email happy athletic supporters think I am ripping off Sports Illustrated and shouldn't make fun of them. "not all jocks are bad" and "I hope you get sued by the magazine" are a couple of the initial responses from sports fanatic visitors.

So, do I fear a lawsuit or think my title or logo is just a little too close to the popular sports magazine to be fair or legal?

A little guy like me with such strongly anti jock opinions is a possible target for the corporate lawyer army at the disposal of such a large sports publishing giant. I'm sure to enrage many who work at Sports Illustrated and much of their loyal readership. Rich sports guys hate to hear discussions like I intend to initiate and someone is sure to try and stop me eventually. Sports Illustrated would be the obvious choice as a vanguard to any assault on my domain name or attempt to scare me into silence if by some miracle my site becomes popular with the masses.

So I'll get rid of my brilliant title and eye catching logo, right? Hell no I won't change a thing. I worked hard on this title and it's perfect for the intentions of my own brand of online "sports magazine". I see no reason to change it and see no basis for any trademark infringement claims or the possibility that anyone might mistake my blog for the official site of this fine sports publication.

I'm no cybersquatter or plagerist and I don't wish to steal anyone else's creative ideas. I've spent my life in creative fields where all I had was my intellectual property and ideas to sell. I understand and support the importance of copyright and trademark laws in ways most people do not since the basis of my very livelihood depends on these laws being fair and enforceable.

But I also will not change my title simply because if you run all the words together and add an "l" it makes a different string of words that happens to be the title of a popular sports magazine. That is also not fair and would make the titles of many publications illegal. If the publishing world had to worry about anagrams and words ran together, we wouldn't have any titles left at all.

I'm not attempting to lure Sports Illustrated's readership, stealing their design, competing with them or affecting the strength of their trademark in any way. Our reader market, subject matter and intentions are in no way similar and our content is vastly different, as are our titles and our logos.

My title contains three words, only one of which can be found in the title of Sports Illustrated. The word "sports" is a word shared in the titles of many sports related publications, as would be expected. The word "illustrated" doesn't seem to have any relation to my verb of "lustrate" and these words have completely different meanings and popular usage. Illustrated is also a word shared by many in the publishing world as a popular title and you don't see them suing each other over it as long as the titles are not identical or intended to decieve the public.

You can't trademark single words and I'm not using the same words anyway. "Sports I lustrated" is not a misspelling of a popular title; it's a sentence and one that has nothing to do with the goals or content of any popular sports publication.

My logo is also vastly different and unique. While we may share the same title font and it may have actually been commissioned by Sports Illustrated to start with, it has since become a standard font in wide circulation in all types of publications, especially on the Internet. I also use a different font, Georgia, for the I and my L is lowercase and italicised. I doubt there would be much confusion amongst the general public between our two logos.

I've searched all Sports Illustraded's current and recently expired trademarks and see none that are in any way similar to my own.

So, no, I don't fear a lawsuit by this well known magazine. I do not copy them nor compete with them in anyway. There is no basis for them to complain at all.

While I might enjoy some extra traffic if sports fans can't spell, I'm sure the people searching for "sports lustrated" or "sportsilustrated" are probably not the type of people who are going to enjoy my views or frequent my blog.

But thanks for the concern and I'm always open to criticism and comment from both sides of the fanaticism fence.

Read the full story of how Lustrated became the title here.

EA has really upset a lot of sports game fans with it's latest move to buy the NFL, they even have a club for boycotting EA sports now. Boycott Electronic Arts's Club Page on 1UP.com

The NFL move is not the only thing that set people off, but I thought it was pretty funny that any company actually has clubs who hate it.

We sure take our sports and games seriously now, don't we?

George J. Bryjak has a lot to say about how we treat athletes as "hero's" and put them on pedestals they don't deserve in his op/ed at USATODAY.com - Don't call jocks sports 'heroes'. He is upset about how the US snowboarding team was heralded as more than just role models. Bryjak quotes many journalists:

"The three young men were "genuine American heroes" ... "the most recent U.S. Olympic heroes" ... "the most unlikeliest of heroes" ... "treated like national heroes." One writer even gushed: "No, this was not your average day on the slopes, unless your average day ends with an Olympic hero saying, 'I've never tried to pick up a girl using a silver medal.' "

Do hero's really use their status to pick up chicks? Not real ones. But snowboarders are not hero's, even if they might be the best in the world. I'm sorry, but as I keep saying running, jumping and playing with balls or riding a piece of plastic down a snow covered hill does not automatically make one a person deserving of public honor or being referred to as "hero".

It just degrades the word. Heros are the guys who jump into the line of fire to save children or the guy who runs into your burning house for a living. They are people who sacrifice of themselves for the greater good of others. I don't think winning a snowboarding medal really does much to further our greater good. It's fun to watch and they are capable of some amazing things. They deserve much recognition for their skill and accomplishments, but heros is not a word I would choose to describe these amazing individuals.

Bryjak makes me laugh when he says:
"One would think that after Sept. 11 we would finally realize that "athlete" and "hero" don't belong in the same sentence. For all of the passions that surround the games we play and watch, they are just that: games with limited social relevance beyond entertainment.

Designating athletes as heroic because of the strength, speed and physical agility they exhibit as competitors makes about as much sense as confirming that lofty status on racehorses or acrobatic dolphins at Sea World."

Funny, but dead on. Being strong or fast or agile does not make you a hero, even if you win silver medals that will help you pick up hot chicks.

Thank God not all athletes think this way:
Some athletes appreciate the difference. "We're not heroes," San Francisco Giants shortstop Rich Aurilia said after Sept. l1. "We're playing a game. The real heroes are the people who are out there clearing the rubble and the people who gave their lives to save others."

Well said Rich. I wish more jocks were like this guy.

Check out the article for some great thoughts about heroism and the problems we have as a society deciding who is deserving of this most noble title and how awarding it to athletes for doing their jobs is degrading to everyone.

In a very old article author Jack White asks some serious questions about the state of modern team sports and the reasons why no one ever seems to want to do anything about it. Dividing Line - April 27, 1998:

He comments that the Clinton presidential town hall meeting on race and sports that was broadcast on ESPN was "so narrowly focused on the inner workings of big-league college and professional sports that any lessons for the larger society were left unclear. How, for example, increasing the number of white cornerbacks in the National Football League will improve race relations quite frankly beats the hell out of me. What we need--and did not get from this panel--is a real discussion about the ways that playing sports, not just obsessing on them, can be used to transmit values that advance racial justice and equity. For that kind of talk you need educators and philosophers, not just coaches, jocks, ex-jocks and wannabe jocks who went into politics."

I worked for ESPN for over three months one time during the 96 Olympics and I don't recall ever seeing any educators or philosophers on the set or in the office. What did he really expect from a bunch of jocks debating the problems in sports which none of them wants to admit even exist? If anyone knows of a sports philosopher, please let me know.

He also complains, as do I, that many young athletes are being lied to and told they have a shot at the big time and shouldn't worry too much about other subjects in school when the reality is that getting a spot on a major team is about as likely as them winning the lottery. These kids need to receive educations so they can have jobs when their major league dreams don't pan out. Yet too often society and the schools look the other way while students at major "learning institutions" spend all their time learning to run and jump and play with balls.

Like Mr. White says: "Don't get me wrong. Playing sports can teach important lessons about teamwork and striving, but it offers a career to only a relative handful of athletes. And until we put sports back into perspective, we're playing a sucker's game."